This week, everyone’s been talking about early access releases again. Why? The headline moment was No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios defending a bumpy early access release by saying, “It’s already pretty clear that going with EA is one of the best decisions we could’ve made.” And then unexpectedly it added: Dark Souls 1 could have been better had it had an early access release too – an odd addendum and I’m not sure I agree with it, but OK. The other thing this week was mega-Wishlisted game Manor Lords arriving in early access in, again, an unfinished state. Neither of these things is remarkable. We know how early access releases go by now – we’ve had them for the past 10 years (god is it really that long?). We know games aren’t finished when they arrive, though there’s still a part of us that sees a game being sold for full-price-like money and expects a full-price-like experience from it. So around Manor Lords and No Rest for the Wicked, a familiar discussion has resurfaced, of when are – and when aren’t – early access releases a good thing?
There are some well-worn arguments here you will have heard before, and undeniably the open development model – which came in at around the same time as the ‘take back control from the publishers’ crowdfunding movement in 2012-ish – has notable benefits. It’s hard to argue against the added income a game makes by launching into early access, with which a developer can finish making a game, without cutting corners. And it’s hard to argue against having a huge and readily available QA team to playtest a game and new features, and offer feedback on them. You no longer need to guess what your audience likes: you simply can let them play it and see what they think. A lot of games that go through early access come out better on the other end, and some have been enormous successes, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hades and Slay the Spire. It’s no wonder each of the companies behind those particular games are set on using early access again.
Indeed, when I think about what I played of Manor Lords, early access seems like a great place for it. To my mind, it has some pacing issues and tuning kinks, and bugs – all of which I expected. It’s also still without some of the important pieces it needs to be a full experience, and all of that, early access can help with. I actually hope that with the money it earns, a few more developers will join the Manor Lords team. It’s been a solo project for several years but some extra people now will help push it down that final stretch. Who knows? Maybe the game will make so much money – there are 3m people with it on their Steam Wishlist after all – Manor Lords will be able to achieve things previously thought out of reach. That’s what happened with Baldur’s Gate 3, remember – the scope of the game increased because of its early access success.
